[Zope-Annce] [Ann] epoz 1.0 beta1 released

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

The epoz project is pleased to announce the first beta version of its 
cross-browser visual HTML editor!

Originally written by Maik Jablonski, the editor famous in the world of 
Zope and Plone was completely redesigned by Paul Everitt (Zope Europe 
Association) and Guido Wesdorp (Infrae) and Philipp von Weitershausen 
(philiKON Valley). The result is a very flexible editing machine based 
on the following concepts:

   - Integration

     epoz was designed to be highly integrable into target products. It
     uses Zope Page Templates (ZPT) for the XHTML templating. ZPTs hide
     templating instructions in XML namespaces. That way, all XHTML
     templates in epoz remain valid XHTML documents and should be able
     to be used in similar templating systems without modification.
     That also means, epoz can directly be used off of the filesystem
     or served by Apache, without any templating engine.

   - Document-centric and asynchronous editing

     Other in-browser editors simply provide a replacement for the
     textarea element in XHTML forms. epoz instead focuses on
     document-centric editing. It lets you edit the contents of an
     XHTML document and dublin core metadata (Title, Creator etc.) in a
     compact and standard-conformant way. Upon save, epoz constructs a
     full-fledged XHTML document again and invokes a PUT request to the
     server. Being a standard HTTP command, PUT requests can be served
     by nearly any webserver, even Apache (with mod_dav)!

   - Customization and extensibility

     The looks of epoz can be modified without having to modify the
     XHTML templates by simply customizing the Cascading Style
     Sheets. Its JavaScript architecture has been modelled after the
     MVC concept. That means you may customize large or small parts of
     the editor without having to reimplement or subclass anything, but
     it also means extending epoz's functionality is just as easy.

Where can I get it?

   You may download a tarball at the the epoz project homepage at
   Sourceforge:

     http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=84377

How can I use it?

   epoz comes with a great deal of documentation already. The
   INSTALL.txt file in the 'doc' directory should provide a small set
   of introductions for Zope users.

   If you would like to see epoz in action without having to install it
   in Zope, you may either download the tarball and open
   'common/epozmacros.html' in your browser or visit the following URL
   (served by Apache, btw):

     http://www.philikon.de/files/epoz/common/epozmacros.html

   If you happen to succeed at integrating epoz into your favourite web
   application server, feel free to contact us if you would like to
   contribute your code to the project. Equally, any documentation
   about how to integrate, customize or extend are very welcome.

What to expect for future releases

   - Link and image toolbox:

     The original Epoz editor provided a toolbox for Plone users that
     was loaded in a browser pop-up window. Since epoz 1.0 puts a lot
     of focus on document-centric editing, it places toolbox elements
     such as a link or image browser and table creator right on the
     edit page. Results for link and image searching will be loaded
     asynchronously in a yet-to-defined XML format.

     In upcoming releases, we will provide asynronous server-side
     methods for link and image searching in Zope2, CMF, Plone and
     Zope3.

   - Plone integration:

     Although we have made an effort to integrate it with Plone
     1.0/2.0, we have seen that current versions of Plone does not
     allow an editor to take over for document-centric editing. Philipp
     has made a Plone Improvement Proposal (PLIP) to provide a visual
     editing architecture in Plone
     (http://plone.org/development/current/projects/PLIP5). The
     proposal has been accepted by the community and Philipp is
     currently implementing. It is expected that Plone 2.1 will be
     ready to be plugged together with upcoming versions of epoz.

How to report bugs?

   Please help us make epoz 1.0 bugfree and report bugs you encounter
   at:

     http://codespeak.net/issues/epoz/ (mind the trailing slash)

   Further questions? Write us to:

     epoz-development at lists.sourceforge.net

We are looking forward to your comments.
On behalf of the epoz project,

Philipp von Weitershausen